The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is developing a new sustainability reporting standard for the food and beverage sector, seeking to make corporate disclosures more consistent and more closely aligned with the environmental and social impacts associated with one of the world’s most extensive industrial value chains.
The proposed Food and Beverages Sector Standard will cover food processing, beverage manufacturing, including alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, and tobacco products. Its scope will extend beyond companies’ direct operations to consider impacts across their value chains, including links to agriculture, aquaculture and fishing.
GRI has selected food and beverages as the first sector to pilot a streamlined approach to developing sector-specific reporting standards. The organisation said the new model is intended to reduce the time required to develop sector guidance while retaining its established multistakeholder due process. The approach will identify topics likely to be material to companies in the sector, summarise significant impacts and direct organisations to relevant existing GRI Topic Standards.
The choice of the sector reflects the scale and breadth of its sustainability impacts. According to GRI, food and beverage industries are responsible for around one third of global emissions and have direct implications for human health and worker safety. Their extensive links to agriculture, aquaculture and fishing also mean that environmental and social impacts can occur well beyond factories, offices and distribution facilities.
For companies, the proposed standard is intended to make impact reporting more complete and consistent by providing clearer guidance on the issues that are likely to be significant for the sector. GRI’s reporting system combines Universal Standards with Sector Standards and Topic Standards, allowing organisations to identify their most significant impacts and report them using disclosures relevant to those impacts.
The initiative comes as sustainability information is becoming increasingly relevant to investors, regulators, consumers and other stakeholders seeking to understand how companies affect economies, the environment and people. GRI said its June 2026 State of Sustainability Reporting research, covering almost 15,000 listed companies globally, found that 43% of food and beverage companies report using GRI Standards. Those companies represented about 70% of the sector’s global market capitalisation.
Peter Dawkins, GRI Standards Senior Manager, said the organisation was seeking input from sector specialists and other stakeholders to ensure that the resulting standard is practical, credible and reflective of the realities of the global industry. The organisation is seeking up to 20 experts from around the world to join a Peer Review Group that will provide expertise and feedback during the development process. Applications are open until 23 October 2026.
The development process is scheduled to continue through 2027. GRI’s current standards programme lists the Food and Beverages Sector Standard as an ongoing project that began in the third quarter of 2026, with public consultation scheduled for the second quarter of 2027 and the standard expected to be released in the fourth quarter of 2027.
The environmental significance of the proposed standard extends across the food system. Food and beverage companies are closely connected to land, water, biodiversity and climate conditions through their supply chains. Changes in agricultural production, water availability, ecosystem health and climatic conditions can therefore affect both the environmental impacts of companies and the resilience of their supply chains.
A value-chain approach could also increase attention on impacts that may not be visible in a company’s own facilities. Agricultural commodities, fisheries and other primary inputs can carry significant environmental and social impacts, meaning that factory-level emissions, energy consumption or waste data alone may not provide a complete picture of a company’s sustainability performance.
This is particularly relevant for African economies, where agriculture remains closely connected to employment, food security, rural livelihoods and export revenues. Food and beverage companies operating across African markets can have supply chains extending from smallholder producers and fishing communities to processors, distributors and international consumer markets. More consistent reporting could therefore improve visibility into sustainability issues across these interconnected activities.
GRI already has sector-specific guidance covering agriculture, aquaculture and fishing. GRI 13 was published in 2022 and applies to organisations involved in crop cultivation, animal production, aquaculture and fishing. Its latest version, published in January 2026, was aligned with revised GRI standards on biodiversity, climate change and energy.
The forthcoming Food and Beverages Sector Standard will sit alongside that existing guidance, focusing on the processing and manufacturing activities that connect primary production with consumer markets. This could create a more coherent reporting architecture across different stages of food-system value chains, although the final scope and requirements will depend on the standard’s development process. The project also forms part of GRI’s broader effort to expand and update sector and topic-specific sustainability reporting. The organisation has already developed sector standards for areas including oil and gas, coal, mining, and agriculture, aquaculture and fishing, while other sector projects remain under development.
GRI is also updating topic standards that address specific sustainability impacts. Its revised climate change and energy standards were published in June 2025 and are effective for reporting from January 2027, while the revised biodiversity standard became effective for reporting in January 2026. For investors and other stakeholders, greater sector specificity could make sustainability disclosures more useful by providing information that reflects the actual impacts and operating conditions of individual industries. For companies, however, the effectiveness of the new standard will depend on whether the final requirements can be applied consistently across different markets, business models and supply-chain structures.
The initiative also highlights the distinction between reporting and sustainability performance. Better disclosure does not itself reduce emissions, protect biodiversity or improve working conditions. Its role is to provide more consistent information about corporate impacts, how those impacts are managed and where material risks and opportunities may exist.
That distinction is important for African markets, where companies increasingly operate across jurisdictions with different regulatory, investment and sustainability-reporting requirements. A common sector framework could potentially make information easier to interpret across markets while giving companies a more structured basis for identifying material impacts throughout their operations and supply chains.
The eventual standard will therefore be tested not only by how quickly it is developed but by the quality and usefulness of the information companies ultimately disclose. GRI’s decision to use food and beverages as the first pilot for its streamlined sector-standard model makes the project relevant beyond the industry itself, as the approach could inform how sector-specific reporting guidance is developed for other industries.
As food systems face interconnected pressures from climate change, biodiversity loss, resource constraints, labour conditions and public health, companies are under increasing pressure to understand and communicate their impacts across the value chain. GRI’s proposed Food and Beverages Sector Standard is intended to provide a more focused framework for that process, with the final standard expected to emerge from stakeholder input and technical development through 2027.
